How Chris Wilder and Dean Smith have made the most of going back to their roots

Dean Smith first held the European Cup at the age of 11. His father was a steward at Villa Park, and Dean would help clean the seats in the Holte End. At the time of the 1982 European Cup win, Smith and his older brother babysat for Pat Heard, a Villa substitute for the final. Because each player was permitted to take the cup home for a short period of time, Smith remembers a day adoring the famous trophy.

In September 2017, Chris Wilder made his Steel City derby debut as manager on the day after his 50th birthday. But it was not his first. In April 1980, Wilder was at Bramall Lane to watch Sheffield United draw 1-1 with Wednesday. He recalls John MacPhail giving the Blades the lead, and the stadium erupting in noise. Wilder was 12 years old.

Two managers, two boyhood fans, two English manager success stories, two original Premier League members restored to the top flight after seasons spent in the cold. And two men who have magnificently controlled and exploited the power of home.

The dangers of going back

Going back to your roots – childhood home, primary school, university town, boyhood club – causes extreme emotions; pangs of nostalgia have positive and negative effects. It provokes warm memories of long summers and a careless, untroubled existence, but also emphasises that life, like time, is irreclaimable.

It also brings with it an extraordinary pressure. Go back as manager to the same ground where you fell in love with football and you are managing the past as well as in the present. Get it wrong, and those cherished memories will forever be tainted. That pressure causes doubt to fester: am I doing this because it is right, or because I am trying to force my own destiny? File nostalgia alongside hope and desire, entirely intangible and thus a difficult landscape on which to lay foundations.

But harness it right, and it can be uniquely powerful. There is a line in TS Eliot’s Little Gidding: “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Coming home can become a natural fit, a tool to connect, rally and resolve a club. In business terms, the power of home is a unique selling proposition. In emotional terms, you use your love for the club as a tool for unity.

Success through harmony

Wilder and Smith have achieved success through harmony. Managers, players and supporters can often feel like component parts at a club, particularly in a climate of transfer churn and regular managerial changes. If supporters believe that the manager is “one of us”, it generates a togetherness that stretches to the playing staff. Both managers were appointed during or shortly after times of great strife. When Smith arrived at Villa Park, the previous two years had witnessed a club tumbling towards – and just escaping – administration and their lowest league finish in over 40 years.

Wilder describes how the relationship between Sheffield United supporters and players were at an all-time low after he was appointed. Fans believed that the players didn’t care and the players were growing weary of the abuse. United had finished 11th in League One, their lowest finish since 1983.

There’s something in that, clearly. It is far easier to campaign on a vision of togetherness when the club is broken. That is one of the ironies of returning home. Return to your childhood scene and find it renovated and sparkling and you realise that it has aged as you have; what you remember has been forever lost to time and progress. Go back to see it empty and crumbling, the same features that formed part of your emotional development left to age through negligence and disrepair, and it is more likely to inspire. Decay creates opportunity.

Blend of goodwill and aptitude

You need ability too; to ignore that would be to do a disservice to both managers. Smith has energised his players with added defensive security and a will to win that is far from ethereal. At Bramall Lane, Wilder has proven himself to be an innovative tactician that rails against our stereotype of the 50-something English manager.

History is littered with clubs who plumped for the nostalgic choice and quickly realised that goodwill cannot account for a shortfall in aptitude. The greatest achievement of Wilder and Smith lies in blending the two.

Get it right, and these are the potential results. Wilder and Smith are the right men, at the right time, doing the right things, in the right places. Swap them over and they would be lesser men and managers. Juggle the challenges and pressures of going home successfully, and you create a whole that is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.